Writing about anatomy last week got me thinking about the difference between actually looking inside the body and doing so imaginatively, which most folks are probably more comfortable doing than heading over to their nearest cadaver lab. And so I re-read Catherine Belling’s essay “Graphic Brain-Imagining” in Atrium, the quarterly journal of the Northwestern University Medical Humanities and Bioethics Program. The first time I read it was during my “body” research last winter. Katie Watson, a presenter at last year’s Festival and a colleague of Belling’s at the Medical Humanities program, had suggested we consider Belling for this year’s Festival. A few phone calls and a little CHF pixie dust later, she agreed to talk about hypochondria at the Festival this fall. (With Watson serving as moderator!)
In her essay, and in my conversations with her, Belling talks about hypochondria not as the stereotypical neurotic, attention-grabbing behavior, but as an amalgam of often quite rational responses to and curiosities about the body. She respectfully observes our human desire—which occasionally turns desperate—to know things we cannot know. (What does our brain look like while it’s working?)
She notes the inadequacy of scans and other forms of imaging output, for these are remnants of the past the moment they are processed. Part of the frustration that leads to hypochondria—I’m paraphrasing here—is that we have no dynamic, real-time technique to verify a body’s wellness or capture the moment that a normal cell becomes cancerous. To compensate for the absence of a technology that could give us this kind of moment-by-moment data, Belling says, we rely on our imaginations. Much of what preoccupies the hypochondriac (and many more of us who have not been thusly labeled in any clinical sense) are the images we create to foretell, forestall, or understand illness.
(I’m also aware of the ways in which this sort of graphic imagining—a word that is so easily mistyped as imaging—can not only help a person cope with their fears about illness, but can also comfort people close to a person who is certifiably sick. I remember, early in my husband’s struggle with cancer, looking at CT scan images with the oncologist. He very cursorily clicked through the “slices” of the tumor, saying this and that about size and dimension and proximity to organs and blood vessels. I stopped him midstream and asked him to please start over—with the images, not the babble—and go slowly so I could try to get a handle on what I was seeing and what would have been visible in a “normal” scan. In hindsight, I think I was stretching for the possibility of understanding those images, as if that might mitigate the problem. But this is the stuff of a different program.)
Belling’s look at hyphochondria promises to be rich and wide-ranging. In our conversations, she touched on several facets of the topic: the psychiatric classification of hypochondria (It’s being reconsidered by the task force developing the new Diagnostic & Statistical Manual, the DSM5.); the hypochondriac’s dilemma (Which is worse—being labeled a hypochondriac or being ”right” and actually getting a dreaded diagnosis?); and several recent, relevant books (Because Cowards Get Cancer Too by John Diamond (New York Times login required), Nine Hypochondriac Lives by Brian Dillon and Jennifer Traig’s Well Enough Alone: A Cultural History of My Hypochondria.). She also confessed a fascination with horror movies: zombies, mutations, and the like. These films expose the horror and, often, the comedy of disease and fear of disease—the humorous and absurd aspects of ailing that simply cannot be part of the practice of medicine. With all this rich material to draw from, Belling’s program is bound to leave us all wondering—what’s going on in there?
Lecture
#400: Sun, Nov. 7 10:00 - 11:00 AM
Tags: hypochondria, imaging, imagination, horror movies
